BEST PAINTINGS
In general, most of the world's best art resides in famous churches, museums,
or galleries. This certainly applies to works by Old Masters like Michelangelo,
Raphael, Leonardo, Rembrandt and Vermeer, few of which are in private
hands, and most of which are priceless. Estimates of the value of the
Mona Lisa, vary from
$700 million to $1 billion.

The final picture in a series of 15 paintings,
all named after Delacroix's masterpiece Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement
(1834), Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger (version O) was bought originally
(along with its 14 siblings) by Victor and Sally Ganz for a total of $212,500
in June 1956. In 1997 it was sold as an individual item at Christie's
for $31.9 million. An example of late Cubism,
the painting was begun by Picasso in 1954, not long after the death of
Henri Matisse, whom he greatly admired.

One of Modigliani's famous female
nudes, this masterpiece of expressionism
shows a naked woman lying on a sumptuous red couch. Painted in Paris during
the final year of World War I, it provoked a public scandal when it was
first exhibited. An angry crowd gathered outside the Berthe Weill Gallery
forcing the police to shut down the exhibition. A bidding contest between
seven interested parties, eventually ended just below the price paid for
Picasso's "Les femmes d'Alger" (1955). This work and
its auction price establishes Modigliani as the most coveted and collectible
artist of the expressionist
movement - indeed, like Picasso, only rarity has prevented his works
from establishing even higher records.

3. Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969)
By Francis Bacon
$142.4 million (2013)
Christie's, New York

One of the first works painted during the
era of "contemporary art",
this life-size triptych shows Bacon's
friend - the portraitist Lucian
Freud (1922-2011) - seated on a wooden chair against an orange background.
The remarkable power of the three canvases comes from the juxtaposition
of light, airy sunshine with the brutal physicality of both the content
and the brushstrokes used to create it. The record-breaking price (under
the circumstances, remarkably close to its pre-sale estimate of $135 million)
was the result of a bidding contest between seven interested buyers. A
combination of expressionism and surrealism,
this complex work establishes Bacon as one of the greatest
modern artists of the mid-20th century.

4. The Scream (1895)
By Edvard Munch
$119.9 million (2012)Sotheby's, New York

One of the greatest
expressionist paintings ever, this Munch masterpiece holds a number
of records. The most expensive painting ever sold at auction, it is also
the highest priced work of modern art as
well as the costliest of all pastel
drawings. The work is seen as an expression of personal suffering.
Munch's mother passed away when he was 5; his sister Sophie died when
he was 14; his father died when Munch was 25, followed by his sister Laura
who developed schizophrenia and was incarcerated in an asylum in Ekeberg.
From Ekeberg Hill, the location depicted in the artwork, passers-by could
hear screams from the asylum as well as the animals from a slaughterhouse
nearby. It was also a scene of suicides. There are three other versions
of this picture: the Munch Museum in Oslo owns two of them - a pastel
as well as an oil - while the National Gallery of Norway holds the earliest
version, an oil painting, dated 1893.

Known as the "lost Picasso" because
it had not appeared in public for almost 60 years this masterpiece - the
world's most expensive work of abstract art
ever sold at auction - last changed hands in 1951 for $18,000.

To illustrate the huge commissions earned
by top auction houses, the sale of this work netted Christie's a cool
$13 million.

The sale means that Picasso - with 3 out
of the top 10 - is now firmly established as the most valuable of all
twentieth century
painters.

A classic example of Andy
Warhol's Pop Art, this 8-foot by 13-foot painting - the last in a
series of four pictures depicting car crashes - consists of two panels:
on the left, a set of fifteen images of a car accident, including the
image of a body sprawled across the vehicle's mangled interior, and on
the right, a large silvery rectangle. Estimated to sell for in excess
of $60 million, this figure was in fact the opening bid, and after a three-way
bidding contest the work smashed the previous auction record for Pop Art
by Warhol - now established as the most valuable of all postmodernist
artists - by more than $30 million. (Green Car Crash, 1963;
sold in 2007 at Christie's New York for $71.7 million.) The painting has
been seen only once in public since 1987.

7.Boy with
a Pipe (1905)
(Garcon a la Pipe)
By Pablo Picasso.
$104.2 million (2004)
Sotheby's, New York

The most expensive work of figure
painting, this Picasso masterpiece took a mere 7 minutes of bidding
to reach the hammered price, which far exceeded the previous record of
$82.5 million set by Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr Gachet in 1990,
breaking the $100 million barrier in the process.

Painted by the 24-year old Pablo Picasso
during his more cheerful Rose Period, (following his mournful Blue Period),
it is surely his most lyrical example of representational
art, as well as one of the most iconic works of the early 20th century
and the finest still in private hands. For an explanation of modern works
like this, see: Analysis of Modern
Paintings (1800-2000).

8. Nurse (1964)
By Roy Lichtenstein
$95.4 million (2015)
Christie's, New York

Instantly recognizable as a Lichtenstein
comic-strip style painting, whose colours and tones are built up with
primary-coloured Ben-Day dots painted through stencils, this picture of
a shocked-looking blonde woman in a stiff white collar and starched white
hat was taken from a comic romance novel of the early 1960s. The work
- like its sister paintings "Whaam!" (1963, Tate Gallery, London)
and "Drowning Girl" (1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York) -
exemplifies Lichtenstein's method of making art out of low-brow subjects,
which was a defining feature of Pop-art
in the 1960s and postmodernist art of
the 70s and later. The sale establishes the artist as the most collectible
Pop artist after Andy Warhol.

9. Dora Maar with Cat (1941) Detail
By Pablo Picasso.
$95.2 million (2006)
Sotheby's, New York

Dora Maar with Cat is a large, luminous,
portrait of Picasso's mistress, seated on a chair with a small cat perched
on her shoulders. Executed in the idiom of Cubism, the artist is trying
to present several simultaneous views of Maar's face. When the work went
on sale in 2006, it far exceeded its $50 million estimate, and became
the second most expensive painting sold by an auctioneer in the history
of art. An inspiration as well as a mistress, Dora Maar (1907-1997)
was one of Picasso's favourite models and the subject of countless interpretations
(eg. Weeping Woman
1937, Tate) during the course of their dynamic relationship which endured
for 11 years from 1935 to 1946. In this portrait of Maar, Picasso has
added numerous deliberate narrative or symbolic elements, including: a
hat, symbolizing a crown; a cat, alluding to feminine guile and sensual
activity; long sharp fingernails (not visible in the picture) to reinforce
the idea of feline aggression; a vibrant colour scheme picking out various
details of Maar's dress (not visible). Whether these elements were intended
to compliment or demonize Maar remains unclear.

In this second portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,
which was painted five years after his first version, the earlier gold
backdrop has been replaced by a quieter, more detached background. Even
so, the halo-like hat and the focus on Adele's face points to Klimt's
continuing regard for her. The painting also demonstrates the artist'snew
attitude to colour (shorn of its
use of gold), as well as his technique of combining elements of reality
and unreality. Art critics typically swoon
over this latter attribute. One has stated that in this composition: Klimt
"demonstrated the liberation of visualization by effortlessly assimilating
a whole series of influences and reworking them into a peculiarly inspired
personal vision." Quite so. Personally, I think Klimt creates beautifully
decorative art, with a few
echoes of German Expressionism
without justifying the artistic genius suggested by the record price of
this canvas. However, he remains the driving force behind the historically
important Vienna Secession,
and can claim to be one of the best
portrait artists of pre-war Europe.

Top 10 Most Expensive
Paintings Sold Privately

1. The Card Players (1892-93)
 Painted by Paul Cezanne
(1839-1906).
 Sold privately in 2011, for $250 million.
 Seller: George Embiricos. Buyer: Royal Family of Qatar.

One of several versions of the same picture
- there are others in the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, and the Courtauld Institute
Galleries, London - the painting is one of the most sought-after works
still in private hands.

If unconfirmed reports are correct, Mexican
financier David Martinez paid $140 million for this signature work by
Jackson Pollock, making it the world's most expensive painting ever. Demonstrates
the growing appetite for concrete
art, but other factors may be involved: notably the relative rarity
of Pollock's works, his unique drip/ splash style of 'action
painting', and his American nationality. The 4' x 8' composition,
comprising oil, enamel and aluminum paint on fiberboard, is a nest-like
tangle of browns, yellows and greys. It exemplifies Pollock's all-over
approach to fine art painting, which
treats all areas of the canvas equally, rejecting all conventional points
of reference or focus.

One of the great exponents of the New
York School of gestural painting, Dutch-born Willem de Kooning was
noted for his biomorphic synthesis of figurative and abstract styles,
often using the female form. Woman III is one of a series of six
numbered 'Woman' paintings and the only one still in a private collection.
The work's exploration of Freudian themes is visible in its staring eyes,
huge breasts and distorted torso, as well as its aggressive brushwork
and absence of 'human' colour.

This work changed hands when a court order
by the Austrian government returned it to the Artist's rightful heir after
its wartime confiscation by the Nazis. Despite its inflated price-tag,
it remains one of the artist's great masterpieces and exemplifies his
fascination with the flat decorative features of Egyptian
art, the gold and mosaic elements of Byzantine
works, Freudian and other symbolism.
A romantic workaholic, Klimt's contribution to the Vienna Sezession and
Germanic Jugendstil
art movement included numerous portraits of Viennas leading ladies,
of which this portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer - the wife of Jewish entrepreneur
Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer - is considered a leading example. Klimt completed
a second portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer in 1912 (see No 5 in the Top 10
Auction Records, above).

Eight Elvises by Andy Warhol was
sold by private treaty in 2009 to an anonymous buyer for $100 million,
according to a report in the London Economist. The 12-ft high picture
has not been seen in public since it was shown in Los Angeles in 1963.

A founding father of Pop-Art, Johns is
noted for his innovative use of mixed-media such as oils, waxed-based
encaustic painting, plaster and collage
(including flags, maps, stenciled words, numbers, newspapers and other
'found materials' or objets trouves). In this work, the most expensive
painting by a living artist, Johns uses stenciled words on a brightly
colored background which provide a literal allusion to the title False
Start. This is because the words - which express colours, red, white
and so on - are painted in (and are positioned on) contradictory colours
to those described. The use of words exemplifies Johns' utilization of
everyday images to stimulate the spectator. See also: Robert
Rauschenberg (1925-2008).

Another fantastically high-priced work
of non-objective art by
the Dutch/ American Expressionist de Kooning. Executed in oils, enamel,
and charcoal on canvas, it is considered by critics to be one of his most
complex landscapes. It was purchased from the artist Sidney Janis and
eventually found its way to auction in 1973 where it attracted a record
bid of $180,000 from the European dealer Ernst Beyeler. Given its present
reported price of $63.5 million, it has appreciated in value 352 times,
over 35 years. Not bad for a painting which (I suspect) few people would
claim to understand, far less appreciate. I certainly don't.

Purchased mid-recession by the philanthropist
Walter Annenberg, this outstanding landscape
painting now hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is
one of three versions of the same scene, completed by Van Gogh while resident
at the Saint-Remy-de-Provence mental institution, near Arles. A
slightly later version, also painted in oils, resides in the National
Gallery London, and a reed-pen drawing of the same view is in the Van
Gogh Museum Amsterdam. The artist himself considered A Wheatfield
With Cypresses to be one of his best summer landscapes, perhaps due
to his improved mood which is evident from the sunny colours, non-aggressive
brushwork and overall warmth of the work.